Freeze Frame Camera Flash in FCP + more

GeniusDV has transitioned from text tutorials to video, with a current emphasis on Final Cut and Avid. A good example tutorial (via Little Frog) is Freeze Frame Camera Flash Effect using Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion:

What should Apple do with Final Cut Pro?

Phillips Hodgetts shares his latest thinking on What should Apple do with Final Cut Pro?

For some background see Final Cut Studio 4: a double scoop.

Update: via @johnmontfx with caveat is Troubled development, 2011 launch rumored for Apple's Final Cut Studio. Rumor has it that besides a massive porting effort, delay is partly due to issues finding a balance between Shake and Motion.

222 Apple Motion Tutorials

Who da thunk there were 222 Apple Motion Tutorials?

The Filmmaker IQ post doesn't include Mark Spencer's All About Motion explicitly though. Filmmaker IQ also collected such lists as 1001 Adobe After Effects Tutorials, 144 After Effects Plug-Ins, 202 Final Cut Pro Tutorials, 202 DIY Filmmaking Tutorials, & 202 Sony Vegas Tutorials.

Motion 3D shadows and the reflection gap

Apple Motion 4 has several refinements including shadows and reflections, demoed on Apple's website. Lynda.com's free Final Cut Studio overview also looked at creating shadows, reflections, and specular highlights.

Recently on MacBreak Video, Mark Spencer looked a bit closer at shadows and reflections in Motion 4. Will Adobe respond to Apple, especially in the reflection gap, or will it be left to user kluges like extrusions? In the meantime, see Built-in reflections in AE for Chris and Trish Meyer's formula and tips for creating "faux" reflections in After Effects without 3rd party tools like RGS Warp or Zaxwerks Reflector.

Update: a Motion extra from Oliver Peters, "I'd recommend that you DO install the Motion content. The biggest content chunk will be the audio files for STP and those can be easily installed on an external drive or not at all. If you don't install the Motion content, some of the text behaviors will not show up in the pulldown menu."

The 'new' Final Cut Studio: v3 the Anticlimax

Apple released a "new" Final Cut Studio for $999 and new versions of Logic and Final Cut Server, and posted a bunch of movies to explain the updates. Motion does get reflections, shadows, and depth. Compressor 3.5 gets DVD and Blu-ray burning -- and there's lots of other nice touches.

Mike Curtis of HD4NDs and PVC has reviews on FCP 7, Motion 4, Color 1.5, etc at Macworld, and there's already free video tutorials.

Lynda.com has a free Final Cut Studio Overview containing 3 hours of video training by Damian Allen, and Ripple Training has 19 free tutorial movies on the new features. Also, Peachpit Press has free new samples for their popular FCS books.

Update: A quick way to get continuing updates on this release is to follow Final Cut User on the web and Twitter (Filmbot; follow Editblog too).

Update 2: Among the ProRes options is 4:4:4 12-bit plus alpha channel, which seems to be poised to finish of the Animation codec (except to those without access). There's a Apple ProRes Whitepaper (PDF) via FilmBot.

AE & Motion apprentice text + 3D spiral text

Chris and Trish Meyer have posted After Effects Apprentice Video Tutorial #4: Animating text in After Effects, which follows on #3 which introduced text in AE. In this video, they "show how to master Text Animators, including Range Selectors, the secret to creating cascading animations, and more."

This follows yesterday's meaty post by Trish Meyer, Animating Text in Apple’s Motion: A primer for After Effects artists.

Also, older but fun is text in a 3D spiral, pictured above, from 3D Type QuickTip by Ko Maruyama, which is reminiscent of a very old tutorial by Brian Maffitt.

AE 3D Earths with & without 'Knowing' lava

There are several tutorials to help you start to construct a rotating 3D Earth in After Effects, but do you know which direction to spin things to avoid the Sun rising from the West?

With Knowing Earth, MaxAfter gives you the project and a good start how to make lava cracks and falling particles similar to a shot in the current movie Knowing. (Quick tangent: see The Nicolas Cage Movie Plot Generator.)

If you want your Earth a bit more refined, Creative Cow has a tutorial that you can peruse, Creating a Realistic 3d Earth using only AE. In this video tutorial, Michael Park uses only effects built into After Effects: "Special attention will be given to combining multiple instances of the CC Sphere effect to create unique layers with different specular properties for the land and water masses, as well as creating lights from urban centers on the night side of the earth."

Maltaannon is also in the ring of 3D Earth tutorials with the variously titled Advanced 3D Planets / 3D Solar System. He planned to create a scaled solar system in 3D that you could fly through, so the 3D Earth tutorial might be just a small piece of the bigger project.

Of course there are several more. Jonas Hummelstrand (with map and texture links), The Genesis Project (with help from Aharon Rabinowitz), and Andrew Kramer also have planet Earth tutorials with projects. Kramer's Video Copilot crew has a variety of planet and related tutorials with projects. You may even find out something new in the old Total Training teaser Globe Grid. Earth zooms are also popular, and tutorials are provided by Video Copilot and Digital Arts.

There's also a tutorial for Apple Motion from Timesaver Tutorials for those stuck in a Final Cut Studio world, Rotating Earth. There are many more of these sorts of tutorials, even by NASA (in AE) using their own images, and some for Google Earth Pro.

You can even do 3D earths in Photshop CS4 Extended. Russell Brown CS4 shows how using real 3D objects (download textures here) in a more advanced tutorial he called Advanced 3D Eclipse Animation.

Most of the projects include textures but there are alternatives. Ever-popular Earth textures (various strings attached) can be found at JHT's Planetary Pixel Emporium (with C4D tutorials), Unearthed Outdoors True Marble-free version, and NASA's Blue Marble Next Generation.

Update: VideoCopilot has a tutorial similar to the one by MaxAfter, Dead Planet, as well as a calmer The Blue Planet in 3D.

Update 2: More earthy textures.

Motion: Comme Ci, Comme Ça

Translation: "Like This, Like That." After frustration in early attempts to use Apple's Motion, it could be easy to just ignore it even if there's still some feature-envy, especially with templates for very quick work, as well as the intuitive 3D interface. After seeing Oliver Peters' quick comments on Motion, a read of The Top Ten Things After Effects Users Love and Hate about Motion by Mark Spencer seemed appropriate.

Here's Oliver Peters comments from FinalCutPro-L:

"I'm in the camp that feels Motion is flakey at best and that AE is far better, but Motion is still worth learning. It rounds out many missing elements of FCP when used together with FCP. For example:

- better scaling than FCP
- only way to do proper 2.5 DVE work
- only way to do 3D DVE work, including with 3D lighting
- proper time remapping / speed ramps
- tracking
- functional green/blue screen keying

Give it another spin. I do find that it is very, very temperamental with some graphics cards. It also suffers from preference corruption that can give you some really weird results. And every now and then, you can create a project on one machine that simply will not open on another. Go figure."

Update: more on Apple Motion can be found at All About Motion, Motion Smarts, Creative Cow, and even Andrew Kramer's sole video on Motion that explains compositing with Motion's Comp sets/ Layer sets/ pre-Comp metaphor. Apple has overview movies for a nice feature tour.

Motion for After Effects Users

Wind Up Toy notes that you can rename a Motion project extension from .motn to .mov and import that into AE, a kludgy way to have the ability to redit your Motion file.

This tip is from MacBreak Studio's Motion for After Effects Users. Hosts Alex Lindsay and Mark Spencer note that the Motion project would be smaller than a movie file but is rendered live on the Mac.

Update: Mark Spencer talks about The Top Ten Things After Effects Users Love and Hate about Motion.

AE pros on Motion

There was an interesting thread on the AE-List on Tuesday, 23 Jan 2007 called "Does Apple Motion suck?" It'll be interesting to see how the next version of Shake incorporates ideas from Motion and AE.

For background information on Motion see Apple, Mark Spencer's All About Motion, and the DV review of Motion 2.0 by Alex Lindsay, with explanatory movie downloads. Please note that the comments were edited down a bit.

Comment 1

Trying to make Motion work like After Effects (I've seen some video training try to do this, to not very positive ends) will usually lead to frustration. Letting go of the AE paradigm and taking Motion for what it is will yield a faaaaaar more positive experience. I rather like it for quick particle and text animations, for example. Although ultimately, I am a control freak and prefer AE's keyframe paradigm + expressions.

We wrote a few more pieces that touched on Motion - may not help exactly what you're up against, but as long as the subject is on the table:

• using hardware controllers as an interface to Motion
• the super-fun (but not _entirely_ intuitive) Replicator
• creating Linear Light in other programs (including Motion - might give some insight on ordering of Behaviors and effects)

Comment 2

As an AE user for 10 years now, I'm of the opinion that Motion is stupid, but has enormous potential in kicking significant portions of AE's huge ass, as long at the Motion engineers at Apple pay serious attention to the gripes of professional motion graphics designers, and fix the numerous deficiencies that the product currently has.

I use Final Cut Pro, and love the integration with Motion (but still envy the superior level of integration that Premiere Pro/AE users have), but I've found Motion to have enough serious flaws in it to preclude its use in a professional environment (at least at a finishing level...it's still awesome for doing rough previz stuff with the client looking over your shoulder).

For those playing along at home, those flaws (at least the ones that immediately come to mind) would be:

- An infuriating lack of keyboard shortcuts for some of the most common tasks, such as keyframe interpolation type, zooming in/out of the graph editor, fit timeline to window, etc. It really wreaks havoc on my carpal tunnel problems.

- Antialiasing just plain sucks in Motion. Even when you set the AA quality settings to the highest level, the render quality is more often than not, horrible (I notice it most with text and slow-pan & scans of images) ...nowhere near the level of quality that we take for granted in AE.

- Its reliance on the GPU is great when it works, but when it doesn't it falls down badly. I had problems a few months ago with Motion actually changing the scale of one of my images whenever I enabled
high antialiasing quality for the project. It turned out that the image was too large for the GPU to handle, so it rendered the image incorrectly. The only way I was able to get the image to render at the correct proportions was to disable high quality AA. A pretty unfortunate workaround, if you ask me. To my way of thinking, there should be a software-only render option to avoid problems like this.

There's actually an interesting Wiki site called "The Problem with Motion 2", which documents many of the problems with the product.

All that said, nothing quite rules more than running DVGarage's Conduit plugin within Motion. It's one of the main reasons why I haven't given up on Motion yet :) The Apple Pro Training book on Motion (by Damien Allen) has an appendix in it which is just what you're looking for (IIRC, it was actually titled "Motion for AE Users"). It does a really good job...

Comment 3

I'm an engineer working on Motion (though I don't speak for Apple, yadda, yadda, yadda). I just want to say thanks to everyone for their kind words on our product. [...]If you have bugs that you actually want us to fix or features you want us to add, the only way that will happen is if you report them as bugs at:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/motion.html.

Trying to warm up to Motion

Motion Smarts is a relatively new website on Apple's Motion software; see the cool text ghosting effect using particles. Note to self: look also at ProAppTips and Apple Motion Info.
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